On October 14, 2026, Phoronix reported a slight overall advantage for Ubuntu 26.10’s amd64v3 packages across more than 200 benchmarks on an AMD EPYC system. The gains depended on the workload: several improved, while many showed little or no change. Phoronix’s results
What Phoronix compared
Phoronix tested a near-final Ubuntu 26.10 build, switching between the default amd64 packages and amd64v3 packages built for the x86-64-v3 instruction-set level. It ran the same tests on the same Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 system, with a 64-core AMD EPYC 9555P. The benchmark report describes the test setup and package variants.
Results depended on the workload
Phoronix reported gains in GNU Radio, SPECFEM3D, Incompact3D and some Python operations. Some read-only PostgreSQL configurations improved slightly, while ClickHouse was only slightly more favorable with amd64v3. Other results varied: Phoronix’s results pages, 3, 4 and 5 describe the following outcomes.
| Workload | Reported result |
| GNU Radio, SPECFEM3D, Incompact3D | Phoronix reported gains with amd64v3. |
| Selected Python operations | Improved; Phoronix said the effect was not widespread. |
| PostgreSQL | Some read-only configurations were slightly better. |
| ClickHouse | Only slightly more favorable with amd64v3. |
| RELION and NWChem | No uplift. |
| NAMD and OpenRadioss | No measurable performance difference in the tested release binaries. |
| OpenFOAM and Blender | No meaningful or measurable difference in the reported tests. |
| PHPBench and Perl | PHPBench was unchanged; Phoronix reported no change to Perl. |
Phoronix also reported no measurable difference in CPU power consumption between the package variants in this test. That result, like the performance findings, applies to its tested system and workloads.
Checking x86-64-v3 support
Ubuntu’s October 30, 2025 architecture-variants announcement gives this command to check for supported x86-64 feature levels:
ld.so --help | grep '\-v[0-9]'
Look for x86-64-v3 (supported, searched) in the output. The announcement describes the opt-in package mechanism for Ubuntu 25.10. Ubuntu’s guidance also warns that a drive containing x86-64-v3 packages cannot be transferred successfully to a computer without x86-64-v3 support.
As of its October 14, 2026 report, Phoronix described the amd64v3 archive as optional and said Canonical had not officially endorsed it as an alternative to generic amd64 binaries.
